


Slowing Down

by LilydaleXF



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, MSR, Season/Series 10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2016-09-06
Packaged: 2018-08-13 12:04:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7976158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilydaleXF/pseuds/LilydaleXF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something happened with Mulder and Scully between "I Want To Believe" and Season 10 that made them go from living in one house to two. This story happens during that time, with them still in one house and Scully thinking about orange marmalade and forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slowing Down

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Anjou for thoughtful beta on this story.

"What's happening to forever, Mulder?" she asks as he balances precariously against the wall by the front door trying to pull on a shoe.

Scully isn't looking at him but she can see him in her peripheral vision. He's always there, lurking and moody and making her wonder if happiness can hurt. Even when he was gone - lost; running; abducted; dead - he was there. Somewhere along the way her world became a reflection of what he saw, and she could feel his gaze, real or imagined, on her constantly. Sometimes his look was support, sometimes it was confusion, sometimes it was lust, sometimes it was annoyance, sometimes it was admiration, sometimes it was everything all at once. Usually everything. He is a very overwhelming man.

"Forever, Scully?" Both his shoes are on now but he remains leaning against the wall as he looks over at her sitting on the couch. His brows are crinkled together and down. He clearly has no idea what she is talking about.

"Never mind, Mulder. Go on out."

He doesn't move.

She remembers.

* * * * *

Mulder repeats something and looks at her with eyes that seem to be all pupil.

She wishes he would be quiet and otherwise put his mouth to work. She arches up toward him, trying to help make that happen.

He mimics her movement by curving back. He's obviously trying to keep the distance between them the same and not break eye contact. So she closes her eyes and raises up a limp arm, exhausted and hot and kind of sticky, and tries to pull him down toward her. He is not following their silently established plan.

Again Mulder speaks, but Scully is still not hearing him. Getting the voice of reason in her head to shut up is so difficult, so rare. She is still so not used to it happening that she instinctively doesn't want to hear a single thing that might jumpstart her brain and launch her into saying an inevitable one thousand words, worth one thousand vocabulary dollars apiece, that she bought for thousands of dollars a year at school.

It's ironic that the person who has so long sparked her mind with such intellectual ferociousness has also become the same person who can turn off that part of her she spent a lifetime intensely cultivating, the part of her she thought might have been the only part left.

She's become addicted to the way he can quiet that voice in her head in less time than it takes for them to get from the front door to the bedroom. Euphoric. He makes her feel euphoric.

Her ankles are hooked behind his calves, her hair is fanned out on sheets she newly changed that morning, his hair has become haphazardly spiked, her favorite shirt lost a button since they're desperately focused but not yet familiar or coordinated enough for one to let the other take the lead, and Mulder will now just not stop talking.

"Shuddup, Mulllll," she is barely able to intone as she tries pulling him closer with her legs.

He laughs. "You have no idea what I'm saying, do you?"

Dammit, she can hear him now. Her heels relax. Her wrist falls against his shoulder. She cracks open her eyes and looks at him.

Through a voice filled with warmth and still tinged with chuckles, he leans just a touch closer to her and says, "I said that we can slow down. We have all weekend, Scully. Just you and me."

"Wuh?" She may not yet be fully able to process what she's hearing.

"You look so beautiful," he non sequiturs. 

"Mmmm, you," she tries to reply in kind.

He dips down with a feather light kiss at her hairline and lingers there. It's enough to stir her to what could pass as a complete sentence expressing a fully formed thought.

"Only the weekend?" she asks, thinking she knows the answer but hoping to hear it anyway.

The "no" that escapes his lips is breath on her temple followed by, "Forever, Scully. This is forever."

* * * * *

Mulder looks at her for a few silent moments before telling her that the address where he'll be is on his desk. Then he turns and heads out the front door with a "see you later." He doesn't close the screen door because he always, always forgets to close the screen door. Part of her thinks it's because he expects her to still be behind him, part of her thinks he's unwilling to heed her repeated requests and reminders, and part of her thinks he's preoccupied and consequently careless. All parts of her are weary.

She glances down at the book she'd dropped onto her lap while he was readying to leave and she had stopped reading to stare at him. Her finger is still pinned between two pages to hold her place.

"I don't care about my place," Scully thinks as she tosses the book onto the cushion next to her, causing the pages to flop closed. She'd been trying to make progress through this same book for three weekends in a row and knew she was still at the start of chapter 5. She didn't want to read, was tired of reading. She wanted to talk, to lively debate, to lie close, to dream, to plan, to love, to give and to take. 

But Mulder had walked out the door on another mission, and her wants seem lost, if not downright silly and unreasonable.

"This is an important lead, Scully," he had said earlier that morning while standing up eating toast. "This guy knew things I hadn't heard from anybody since the Gunmen. I have to go see him."

He'd made her toast too and had gotten out the orange marmalade she only eats on the weekend. He loves her, and he tells her with a jar left on the table. She loves him too, so she shoots him a smile as she reaches for the jar. She doesn't even care that he is talking to her with his mouth messily full of toast. No, that is not true.

"Gross. Slow down, Mulder. Chew first."

He swallows. "I'll probably be gone all day. I have to drive pretty far."

"Are you leaving now?" She had just come downstairs and was seeing him for the first time today. He routinely stays up late, but he usually rises before the sun. If she's out of bed by 9 a.m. on a day she's not working at the hospital, she considers it a boon for the day.

"Not for over an hour. There are some files I want to pull and look at again, though."

She asks, "Solo?"

He cocks his head down and to the side and huffs out a breath. "You know how these kinds of guys are, Scully. He's only expecting me."

She had meant the files. Sitting together cross-legged on the floor of his office with theories flying like a breeze and papers covering them like a blanket sounded really good. She sometimes misses times like that even though his office is a dark crazy lair of oddities, including Mulder himself. She doesn't correct his assumption, though.

Now she's alone in the house with files he didn't think to share, a book she doesn't want to read, a sticky orange knife in the sink, and hours of daylight she doesn't know how to pass.

* * * * *

Scully stirs awake late that night thanks to a strange owl hoot outside. She doesn't think she will ever get used to hearing animals outside instead of cars.

Mulder is safely home and next to her, though he wasn't there when she went to sleep. His hand is resting against her hip. He is clearly asleep.

"What happened to you today?" she wonders. She is so tired from her day of endless fussing from one activity to another with none of them feeling right, but that bird woke up her brain. She thinks, "Did you find what you were looking for? Do you have another stuffed file for the pile? Are you going to leave your office for the rest of the weekend? Is this line of pursuit over?"

Mulder pursues things until there is nothing left to pursue.

He is hers and she is his, about that neither of them have question. But she worries that with her he had a goal and pursued it to a satisfying fruition.

He protects her fiercely - from prickly plants he sees when they're walking in the yard, from takeout food that is too spicy, from having to do laundry after she's been on shift for 20 hours, from her brother's calls when she wants Mulder for an evening as the only voice of family, from the piles of papers and pinned boards of pictures overflowing his office with conspiracies and dangers.

"But they're not dangers to me, not anymore," she thinks. At least not any more than they ever have, to her or to him. The conspiracies and dangers are still fantastical and dire, but, for her, time has turned them into paper kites caught in a whipping wind not moving any closer to Earth or being tamed in any meaningful way by their hard work and risky investigating.

It hasn't changed for years that she'd do nearly anything to fight and protect against real dangers, securely partnered with Mulder as ever, but the opportunities she has to do so have slowed down in tandem with the reasons why certain dangers used to seem so real and imminent. She can still see the spark of hope and belief in him, like today. What is she missing? Anything?

"How do you see me now, Mulder?" she whispers as she observes the shadowy contours of his face and runs her fingers lightly through his hair. He doesn't quite wake at the touch, but his fingers on her hip mirror her rubbing movement.

"Sorry," she offers. "Go back to sleep."

"What? Okay?" he mumbles.

"Shhh, Mulder. It's okay. Tomorrow. We have tomorrow."

She believes that, she thinks. She believes in them for every tomorrow, and she knows he does too. "But maybe that's not enough" is the last thing she thinks before her mind falls quiet in sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> I am so sorry for the bummer! I think Mulder and Scully's parting becomes even more complicated than this, but Scully's isolation from their former work due to her hospital job and Mulder still continuing that work to some degree had to affect her a lot. At least we know they're back to fighting monsters and men together in season 10 (until that finale, anyway...).


End file.
